I love having something visual to keep me on track whilst I’m chipping away at our Debt Snowball, I like being able to see that I’m making progress even if I’m only throwing the odd pound at it every now and then (because we all know that those £1’s here and £2’s there add up!)
My favourite way to keep track of any money goal is by using a 1% Tracker, ‘Whats a 1% tracker?’ I hear you ask, let me explain…
‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time’
Turning one bite into 1%
The premise of the 1% tracker is simple, you’re just breaking down a big goal into smaller incremental goals. In this case it’s 100 1% increments and those 1% increments are represented by little squares.
Say you have a Goal of getting your £1000 Baby Emergency Fund, you just divide the £1000 by 100 to give you £10 and that’s the value of each 1% square.
Trackers are a great way to keep you accountable and reminding you of the end goal, I actually got the idea of using them for the Baby Steps after taking part in Emmas Make £1000 for Christmas Challenge where she shared her tracker and the idea of breaking things down into smaller steps.
How to use them for your debt snowball
You need a separate tracker for each individual debt (luckily I have made it so the printable has two trackers on each A4 printout)
Write the name of the debt at the top and add in the current balance, then get a calculator and divide the current balance by 100, whatever that result is is your 1%.
So if we’re looking at this example in the photo…
… the debt is to Barclaycard, The balance is £3000, I divided that by 100 to give me £30 as my 1% value.
Each time I throw money at my snowball I make sure to colour in the equivalent amount of squares, some months I might have an extra £15 left in the budget so I’ll only colour in half a square and because I don’t like having just half a square coloured in (because I’m a bit weird like that) it really pushes me to try to find another £15 to make it up to a full square, it gets quite addictive!
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